It is difficult to imagine Christmas wthout Noddy Holder’s dulcet tones yelling “It’s Christmas” midway through their enduring seasonal classic Merry XmasEverybody.
Over five decades after it’s release it remains as popular as ever and still makes lead singer Noddy Holder a huge amount of annual royalties. While the PRS [Performing Right Society] estimates he earns more than £500,000 per year from the song they also keep exact figures secret to protect their clients. However Channel 5 did some digging in 2016 and concluded the figure was more like £1 million a year.
Noddy himself acknowledges the fascination with the income from the track. In 2021 he told The Guardian: “Everybody wants to know how much money we make! I can’t put a figure on, because it’s just different every year. Some years it’s used in an advert or movie. There’s been all sorts of cover versions…I’ll get my annual PRS statement and the cross-section of artists who perform it on their Christmas tours is amazing. All four of the original Slade share performing rights but it just happens that Jim [Lea] and me were the main writers, so we earn more. It’s like having a hit record every year. So it’s a nice pension plan, I’ll say that.”
It is quite the payday for a song that partially sat on the shelf for years before being reimagined as the Christmas cracker the public knows and loves.
In 1973 the bands manager Chas Chandler suggested they write and record a festive track but most of the band weren’t convinced. Jim Lea took it on board though and came up with the majority of the song while having a shower.
He then recalled a track called Buy Me a Rocking Chair, which Noddy had written and dismissed back in 1967 in his first attempt at solo songwriting. They dusted it off and Merry Xmas Everybody took its melody for the chorus whiel using Jim’s melody for the verses.
When it came to the legendary lyrics Noddy, who finished the song at his mother’s house in Walsall, told Daily Mail in 2007, he “wanted to make it reflect a British family Christmas.”
“Economically, the country was up the creek. The miners had been on strike, along with the grave-diggers, the bakers and almost everybody else. I think people wanted something to cheer them up – and so did I. That’s why I came up with the line ‘Look to the future now, it’s only just begun’. Once I got the line, ‘Does your Granny always tell you that the old ones are the best’, I knew I’d got a right cracker on my hands,” he reflected.
However, before the band could record the track tragedy struck. Four days after the end of their huge European tour the band’s drummer, Don Powell was in a car crash, which killed his girlfriend and left him on life support for six weeks. Encouraged by doctors to get back behind his drumkit Slade headed to New York to record away from the limelight.
Due to Don’s recovery they had to record the drum track in bits and pieces as he couldn’t remember it all. In an interview with Uncut Don recollected: “I could still play the drums, but I couldn’t remember any of the songs. On our first rehearsal back we played Cum On Feel The Noize and I had to ask how the song went. I remember once playing Merry Xmas… as an encore and I had to ask the others to sing it to me so I could remember how it went. It was very strange at the time, with the amnesia. But they didn’t treat me that different, I had to fend for myself which was better than having everything done for me.”
The recording also took place during an uncomfortably hot August in the city and the band got more than a few odd looks as they screamed about Christmas in a corridor to get the echo they wanted on the tracks. Their efforts were not in vain though as even before it was released the track had around half a million advance orders.
It became their sixth, and final, number one single and their third of 1973. Indeed demand was so great for the record the band’s record label Polydor had to to use their French pressing plant to keep up. It went on to sell over one million copies that year remaining at number one in the charts until mid-January 1974.
It’s legacy is enduring. It has charted eight times in the 80s, twice in the 90s and every December since 2006, since the advent of downloads counting towards the UK Singles Chart. As of December 22, 2023, the track has over 125 million Spotify streams. In 2021 they released a video for the song for the first time ( the famous clip of them performing the song is taken from Top Of the Pops). The animated clip has had 3.8 million views to date.
With the song as popular as every it looks like Noddy’s “pension plan” is secure for the foreseeble future.
